One of the first things Gary Carden said to me when we met for the first time — and I get the sense he would say this to any young city gal who walked in carrying an iPhone and wearing red heels — was that I should pay him very little attention, as he was “just a poor, stupid mountain fella.”

I was not fooled by Carden’s signature strain of Appalachian self-deprecation, and anyone who’s witnessed a Gary Carden play, read one of his novels or seen any of his singular storytelling performances probably isn’t buying it either.

A celebrated teacher, storyteller, novelist, historian, screenwriter and playwright, Carden is known for giving authentic voices to historical and fictitious Appalachian characters. His latest work, “Outlander,” a play accompanied by a full score of mountain music by local musician Frank Lee, will debut Saturdayat Parkway Playhouse in Burnsville.

Carden is one of a small handful of career wordsmiths born, bred and still living in Appalachia — a rare combination of academic insight and authentic mountain-folk brio. This makes him a one-of-a kind performer and certainly gives him a literary edge in capturing colloquial tales.

But more importantly, it makes him a keeper of Appalachian authenticity, and one who can actually translate the real thing onto a page or stage.

But Carden is not simply a passive host of this heritage. He doesn’t just live the fading mountain lifestyle of Jack Tales and folklore. He has made it a mission to evoke the rich culture he holds dear through his various art forms and preserve its historical juices without the “Hee-haw” stereotypes that often plague dramatic works depicting Appalachia.

“The world of ‘Outlander’ is going, almost gone,” he said. “I want to evoke that lost world ... to conjure it up and make it walk and talk again. Of course, the problem is the people who speak the language and who embody the values and traditions are almost gone.”

A 'decorated' truth

The son of a mountain musician who was killed when Carden was a toddler and a mother who left him with his grandparents and “caught the bus out of town,” Carden was raised by Scots-Irish grandparents in a Jackson County home “filled with the past.” He still lives in his grandparents’ old yellow homestead in Sylva with his dog, Jack.

Carden found his storytelling voice almost as early as he had one at all — using about 150 of his grandfather’s chickens as his first audience.

“I have always been a storyteller, but as a child, it sometimes got me in trouble,” he said. “I remember teachers who brought me home from school and told my grandparents that I told my classmates tales about cowboys, Indian raids, wild horses. All I was telling them was the plot of the Saturday Western that I had seen.

“They said that apparently, I didn't know the difference between fantasy and reality,” he said. “But they were wrong about that — I just preferred one to the other. My grandmother always told people that most of the stories that I told were true, but they were ‘decorated’ a bit.”

Many of Carden’s works are autobiographical, which is perfect not only for authenticity, but because Carden himself is a character that not even Gary Carden could probably dream up.

Now 77 years old, Carden says he is “about 90 percent deaf” but still speaks and tells at what appears to be full capacity.

These days he’s typically sporting a pair of American flag-patterned suspenders over a well-loved T-shirt, and although his health leaves him more easily exhausted than he once was, he makes up for any lack of physical energy with a booming voice and wild gesturing.

His hands seem to have a storytelling quality of their own, arms almost always flailing overhead as he speaks. No statement or tale is too mundane to be said without full performance-style intonation.

“I am a product of a culture in which storytelling is a way to communicate,” Carden said. “If a traveler stops and asks a mountain native for directions, he will probably get a story. He would get directions as well — they would simply come wrapped in a story.”

Among his long list of career honors, Carden earned an honorary doctorate from Western Carolina University and taught English and drama for 15 years after becoming a full-time storyteller in 1984.

His best-known Renaissance-man role, though, is probably as an award-winning playwright, whose works have been produced across the country.

But he says he is first and foremost a storyteller. His plays, including “The Raindrop Waltz,” “Land’s End” and “Birdell,” are all based on his stories.

“Yes, I taught school, and I was a good teacher, but it was just an excuse to tell stories,” he said. “Everything begins with storytelling.”

Carden recently tried to shut down his old farmhouse in exchange for a nice, modern little apartment with fancy amenities like a dishwasher and central heating.

Not surprisingly, it didn’t work out.

“I tried retiring, and it was purgatory,” Carden said. “I talked my friends into coming and getting me and my poor chattels and bring me back to a cold house with a leaky roof, where I can watch the Balsam mountains fade in the twilight and play Guy Lombardo 45s.

“I would rather freeze here than become comatose there,” he said. “I gotta admit, though, that was a nice apartment.”

'Outlander'

Carden’s most recent labor, “Outlander,” which he says he’s been “dragging around for a decade,” chronicles the work of Horace Kephart, a librarian, academic, author of “Our Southern Highlands,” and founder of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Spanning nearly three decades, “Outlander” depicts early 20th-century life in the Appalachians, including moonshine, music, storytelling, humor and the epic quest to create the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Lee, who is a member of The Freight Hoppers (a group that specializes in traditional music and has recorded three albums), took his first venture into theater with the play.

“Our intent with this was always to be very authentic and not to be another stereotype of mountain culture,” Lee said. “Many representations of the Southeast have been very hokey, but we wanted this to be very real.”

Carden has certainly cultivated that realness in spades in the past — and he does it in a way that few in his field have been able to.

Carden admits that he is “susceptible to flattery,” and he relishes the many accolades he has collected over the years. But not even he can lay claim to the art of storytelling, he said. That belongs to us all.

“Everybody is a storyteller — at least, everybody has a story to tell,” he said. “I don’t buy this academic crap that you can be ‘trained.’ Good storytelling is spontaneous. Good storytellers do not memorize their stories. They tell stories with no clear idea of what they are going to say next.

“When they do that, their story has an energy and a vitality that a ‘memorized’ story does not have,” he said.

“You give the audience something that they love, and the audience gives the storyteller something back.”